We’re very happy to announce that WPtouch has been acquired by the folks at SureSwift Capital Inc., another great Canadian software company. Since acquiring WPtouch, SureSwift’s team has been working very hard — and in close contact with WPtouch’s founders — to continue strengthening WPtouch’s position as the most popular mobile solution for WordPress.

What does this mean for our current customers?

If you’re using WPtouch products (the plugin, extensions, and themes) your license will continue uninterrupted. Current customers have no reason to worry. For you, little has changed and what has changed is for the better! The SureSwift team is investing fresh new resources into developing WPtouch and, in the coming weeks and months, you can expect a slew of product updates, new features and more!

What’s the original WPtouch team doing?

For most of them, it’s life as normal! The excellent support and development team will continue to work on WPtouch alongside the broader team at SureSwift. They are also welcoming several new staff members (more info on them to come shortly!) to help grow and improve WPtouch for its customers. As for us (WPtouch’s original founders, Duane and Dale), we are assisting in the transition and continuing to support the new team as it further executes on their vision.

What led to the decision?

Some people might not realize, but we’ve been working on WPtouch for over 8 years. We realized early on that, as WPtouch continued to grow, it would eventually outgrow our comfort levels in terms of scale. Don’t get us wrong, this is a great problem to have! But it led us to begin a casual search several years ago for a partner or owner who would be willing to take on WPtouch and continue our work.

Only now have we found the right fit. In SureSwift, we found a great partner and excellent steward for WPtouch. SureSwift’s focus is on acquiring mature, profitable businesses, and their expertise and vision promises to carry WPtouch forward in a way that we can be proud of. We are excited that WPtouch has a bright future.

What’s next for WPtouch?

While we’ve never shared too much about future plans for WPtouch, rest assured there are lots of great ideas that we’ve had for quite some time without the resources to make them a reality. SureSwift will be injecting time, efforts and capital into the product, with new team members to execute on many things that we weren’t able to.

Thank You

To all of our dedicated, loyal customers over the years we wish to thank you for supporting us and WPtouch and helping make it the best mobile solution for WordPress for almost a decade. We know the product is in capable hands and we hope you’ll continue to enjoy what WPtouch can do for your websites.

To the WordPress community itself we also wish to thank you deeply — you’ve been so supportive, encouraging and inspiring over the years, and we’ve met many great friends over this time.

WordPress is the best thing that happened to the web over the past decade, empowering millions and millions of individuals and businesses to share ideas, grow businesses, and redefine the limitations of what you could do with a website.

We don’t know what the future holds for us, but we’re excited for both our own careers forward and the future of that little mobile plugin that matured into a household name in the WordPress ecosystem.

Our newest releases of WPtouch, version 4.3.6, and our free version, 4.3.9, are out! The releases solve a few bugs that our users reported, and makes WPtouch compatible with the newly-released WordPress 4.7. In addition, the latest releases address a compatibility issue with Wordfence.

For Pro users, we’ve also released updates to our Bauhaus theme, and the Power Pack and Multi-Ads extensions.

Specifics on each update is below:

WPtouch Core

* WPtouch is now compatible with WordPress 4.7!
* We resolved a bug that was causing an error message to display for users of WPtouch and the latest version of Wordfence. The message was a false-positive, and our update fixes it.

Bauhaus (including free)

* We fixed a small bug that could cause sticky posts to display when they shouldn’t.

Power Pack

* We fixed a bug that left some HTML code behind for users who had enabled JavaScript minification. The left behind code did not cause any functionality issues, but removing it keeps the code of your website clean.

Multi-Ads

* We improved how the extension displays the mid-content ad, specifically fixing a bug where it would sometimes not render in posts that had embedded tweets.

We’re looking to add an enthusiastic WordPress developer to join the WPtouch team to help work on WPtouch, this website, and various other bits of pieces of code within the WPtouch world.

In addition to PHP, JS, and CSS skills, we’re looking for someone who regularly participates in the WordPress community, can work effectively remotely, loves squishing bugs in their spare time, and someone who is already familiar with (and hopefully loves!) WPtouch.

If you’re interested in joining the team, please review the full job posting and send us your resume along with an email cover letter telling us why you’re the best person for the position. Please also include some PHP theme and/or plugin code samples so we can get a sense for how you code.

Last week we released updates for our core WPtouch Pro plugin, as well as our Bauhaus theme. This was a compatiblity release, and along with a minor bug fix, we added much better support for plugins that interact with the WordPress comment form! These changes were also bundled up and released in WPtouch free.

You may notice a small cosmetic change to the layout of the comment form, but the significant change was under the hood. With this change, other plugins that want to interact with the form now can.

You can, for example, now use JetPack’s Comments module to simplify the form, and allow users to identify themselves using a social media account.

We hope that this update will allow you to take better advantage of the many WordPress plugins out there, and spark more discussion on your blog!

A changelog for this release is below.

WPtouch Core

* We resolved a bug that could output a PHP warning message for some users. The warning appeared in the mobile theme’s menu, and the bug that triggered it is now fixed.
* We made a couple of small changes to support Bauhaus’ new comment form.

Bauhaus

* We replaced our old comment form with the newer, better supported WordPress form.

Today we released new updates for both the free and pro versions of WPtouch, and a few of our themes and extensions! These are minor updates, but they incorporate feedback that we’ve received from customers and users to make WPtouch better and more stable. For a list of changes included in this update, read on.

WPtouch Core

* We resolved a small conflict for users between Yoast SEO and WPtouch. The issue affected the page titles for the homepages of customers who were using a mobile homepage that was different than their desktop site’s homepage.

Bauhaus (including free)

* We resolved an issue where for some customers the featured slider would display, even if no posts had a featured image set.

* We resolved a bug that hid blog posts for some users who had a specific configuration.

Prose

* We re-added the Back button for websites running in Web-App Mode.

Multi-Ads

* We added a new field to allow users to insert custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into the <head> section of their website. This improves compatibility with some ad providers that require code in the header. Checkout the “Customer header HTML” field at the bottom of Multi-Ads’ settings!

Web-App Mode

* We updated our prompt bubble so that it will no longer appear for Android users who are viewing the site from within the web-app.

Power Pack

* We fixed a bug that prevented the CSS and JavaScript minification from working correctly on some servers.

Recently Google announced it will be switching from a desktop-first to a mobile first search index, this means that Google will be indexing the mobile versions of pages and not the desktop as its primary index.

Where WPtouch fits in

WPtouch webpages are comprised of the same content as your desktop theme, and thus will be picked up appropriately by Google. Only sites which use some other mobile site, or a separate domain (like an m.* domain) might need to make some changes.

Most responsive themes should be ok, but you should always check your website against Google’s Mobile Friendly tool to make sure.

Google has included WPtouch previously on its short-list of solutions for WordPress websites when it comes to mobile. WPtouch sites are mobile-first, mobile friendly and mobile designed themes.

Is Google making the right decision?

Mobile search share continues to grow. It has been over 50% for years now, and shows no sign of letting up. It’s likely the right time to switch and let mobile lead in terms of search and content on the web. We continue to believe that WPtouch remains the top solution for a no-compromises approach to mobile development and WordPress, allowing site authors to keep the best of both worlds— a great desktop presence, plus a smart mobile solution.

What do I have to do?

Nothing! If you’re using WPtouch, all is right in the world. When Google makes the switch we expect WPtouch-powered websites will continue to top mobile search listings around the web.

So what happens for desktop search?

While it’s true that desktop users will see different results it’s likely a good thing, as results will become more accurate for desktop users.

While some have interpreted this to mean that Google is “downgrading” desktop in some way, there are practical reasons why Google would want to prioritize mobile for updates. For one, mobile now accounts for the majority of all Google searches, so using an index that was created primarily for desktop no longer makes sense.

As with everything we do on the web, context matters. We often search differently on mobile than desktop, so having the two behave differently (from an algorithmic perspective) seems like the right approach to us.

When is it happening?

It looks like the new mobile-first search index will be rolling out before the new year, so it won’t take too long to see what happens.

Previous Blog Entries

As we mentioned in our last post announcing our acquisition, there have been some exciting new changes recently with WPtouch! Not only have we made some changes with the management team, but there have also been a few new members joining the WPtouch product team. As such, we’d like to bring attention to the current WPtouch…

We’re very happy to announce that WPtouch has been acquired by the folks at SureSwift Capital Inc., another great Canadian software company. Since acquiring WPtouch, SureSwift’s team has been working very hard — and in close contact with WPtouch’s founders — to continue strengthening WPtouch’s position as the most popular mobile solution for WordPress. What does…

Our newest releases of WPtouch, version 4.3.6, and our free version, 4.3.9, are out! The releases solve a few bugs that our users reported, and makes WPtouch compatible with the newly-released WordPress 4.7. In addition, the latest releases address a compatibility issue with Wordfence. For Pro users, we’ve also released updates to our Bauhaus theme,…